Chamber and committees

I thank Maggie Chapman for bringing this important debate to the chamber and for giving voice to the concerns that are felt by many in the university sector.

As a member of the Education, Children and Young People Committee, and from the contents of my inbox, I am well aware of the strength of feeling on the issue. Although it is hard for the committee to intervene in a dispute between employee and employer, I welcome the fact that the committee has committed to looking at wider issues and challenges in the university sector later this year.

Scottish Conservatives, like others who have spoken today, remain incredibly grateful to lecturers and teaching and support staff at universities, who have worked exceptionally hard in the past two years as Scotland has gone through the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. That work builds on years of professionalism and world-leading research and teaching. Without our lecturers and teaching staff, our university sector would not be as vibrant and successful as it is and would have fallen further behind in the face of financial pressures.

Given that clear and unwavering commitment, the fact that we are seeing widespread strike action and discontent speaks of a deep unhappiness in the sector, which is something that Scottish Conservatives are concerned about. Of course, we do not want education to be further disrupted, especially for students, but we recognise that staff face pressures and that changes to pensions and issues with pay and conditions are understandably sources of frustration and threaten the long-term viability of the sector.

Although I do not believe that it is for politicians to tell independent institutions how to employ their staff, I cannot believe that anyone thinks that the casualisation of the university workforce, unsafe workloads or inequalities in pay and promotion are in the best interests of university staff, students, universities or Scotland as a whole. Parliament and Government have a role here: we should be asking difficult questions about funding and the general decline that the current model promotes.

If universities do not feel that fair working practices are affordable under the current funding model and in the context of the courses that they provide, they must speak out to explain the challenges that they face. In the meantime, the priority must be for university bosses to get back round the table with staff and unions to try to find a way forward. It is disingenuous of members of the governing party to suggest that the Government has no role. Although it is not for the Government to tell universities what to do, it has an important role in facilitating that discussion and in making it clear that, where Government funding supports activities, fair work and good relations between employer and employee must be at the heart of all decisions.

The long-standing issues must be resolved, or everyone will suffer. We cannot let the issue drag on: all parties must take responsibility for bringing it to a conclusion and moving the sector forward. I again thank the member for today’s debate, which I hope will nudge the situation a little further forward. As we have heard from other speakers, the issues will not be easy to resolve.

That is all very well and good, but I would like to know what the cabinet secretary has to say to my constituent who wrote this:

“As a parent of an S3 who is picking her options for next year, I am very concerned at this narrowing of the curriculum and education generally at such a young age. We have relatives in England of the same age as my daughter and they will be sitting ten exams next year. It just doesn’t compare and surely leaves our children here in Scotland lacking a wide and rounded education and massively disadvantaged against their peers in other parts of the UK and, indeed other parts of Scotland where children still get to sit at least eight subjects at Nat 5 level.”

Does the cabinet secretary agree that there should be a minimum number of subjects offered to all pupils in Scotland?

5.

To ask the Scottish Government what action is being taken to increase subject choice for secondary pupils. (S6O-01074)

However, the issue is compounded by the fact that those schools often have a small staff facing a number of competing priorities, which means that they do not have the same space that teachers in a larger school might have to take part in that reflective work. I have a big worry about that. Sometimes, people in single-teacher schools are under more pressure and do not have that kind of professional freedom or space. I know that all teachers are pushed for time and are under pressure, but I think that it is a particular challenge in those schools.

Staff in smaller schools have a barrier to participation, because they do not have the time and space to participate in initiatives beyond school level. They struggle to find cover to keep a school going, which would allow them to participate.

I regularly get feedback from teachers that Education Scotland still feels too remote from what is happening in the classroom, that it can be urban and central belt-centric in its thinking, that the needs of smaller, rural schools, in particular, can be missed and that, although a lot of the advice and guidance that the agency gives is fine—they are not challenging its content—it can be quite generic. Does Education Scotland take that feedback on board?

There are more things that I would like push on, but, in the interests of time, I will accept that.

That leads to the second issue that I will raise briefly, which is that a lot of headteachers in smaller schools feel excluded from PEF, either because they are in the 3 per cent of schools that get no PEF at all or because they receive such a small amount of PEF that it is difficult to do something meaningful with the money. Do you reflect on that? Is there a policy challenge for schools that get no PEF? Such headteachers are not empowered in the same way to do things differently in their schools. That is another problem that attaches itself particularly to smaller rural schools.

Would you accept that that is not consistent across the country? That is an example of something that is working well in one of the collaborative areas, but it is not necessarily replicated across the country. Earlier, someone mentioned the fact that the various collaboratives set out the opportunities and their slant on equity in different ways, and there is certainly a feeling in the local authority area that my constituency is in that the interests of smaller rural schools is not always reflected in how the priorities are set out. You can imagine the frustration of the teacher in a school whose pupils are experiencing rural poverty when the circumstances of smaller schools are not reflected in the decisions that are taken.

I come back to the generic point that people feel not that those resources are bad but that they are not school specific and that they are not of the same quality as those that other people enjoy through face-to-face and other opportunities.